THE central government is launching a new crackdown on online pornography, complaining that the growth of Internet smut has "perverted China's young minds."
The Ministry of Public Security said the six-month campaign will target cyber strip shows and sexually explicit images, stories and audio and video clips.
"The boom of pornographic content on the Internet has contaminated cyberspace and perverted China's young minds," said Zhang Xinfeng, a deputy public security minister.
The latest effort also will target illegal online lotteries and contraband trade, fraud and "content that spreads rumors and is of a slanderous nature," Zhang said at a news conference in Beijing.
In China's biggest online porn case to date, Website operator Chen Hui was sentenced in November to life in prison. Chen's Website had more than nine million pornographic images and more than 600,000 registered users.
China has the world's second-biggest population of Internet users after the United States, with 137 million people online.
"The inflow of pornographic materials from abroad and lax domestic control are to blame for the existing problems in China's cyberspace," Zhang said.
The Beijing Reformatory for Juvenile Delinquents said 33.5 percent of its detainees were influenced by violent online games or erotic Websites when they committed crimes such as robbery and rape.
Also yesterday, the Ministry of Public Security gave details on several major criminal cases that involved Internet pornography, prostitution, gambling and fraud.
Among them, Zhang Yuancheng, a resident of Jingzhou City in central China's Hubei Province, was arrested for running two pornographic Websites that offered cyber strip shows.
When police arrested Zhang, the Websites had more than 4,000 members and 400 performers and each pulled in daily profits exceeding 10,000 yuan (US$1,300), officers said.
Zhang was sentenced to four years in prison.
In January 2007, Beijing police arrested a gang that used the Internet to organize prostitution on a wide scale. Some 151 people, including organizers, prostitutes and their clients, were arrested, and 42 mobile phones and 195 computers confiscated.
In a similar case, police in Nanjing, capital of east China's Jiangsu Province, captured 12 members of a prostitution gang that was selling services through the Internet and confiscated five computers.
In another case, a person surnamed Li opened a pornographic Website in north China's Tianjin Municipality to distribute pornographic material. Li had more than 260,000 members when police shut down the Website in May 2006.
Li was sentenced to four years in prison by a local court.
Police in Yangzhou City in east China's Jiangsu Province cracked a Web gambling case in October 2006, arresting 37 suspects.
The suspects ran the on-line gambling site for nearly two years, handling more than four billion yuan in bets.
Two other cases involving Web fraud and theft were cracked in Heilongjiang and Jiangsu provinces. Several hundred people were cheated in those cases.
